


leave as though fire burns under your feet

by perissologist



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Murder Mystery, ooooh boy you're all gonna yell at me for this one
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-05-02 01:42:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19189345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perissologist/pseuds/perissologist
Summary: That glow is gone, now. Gone from Dick’s skin, gone from inside him. It used to shine out of him, out of all the cracks the world put in him. But now Bruce looks down at him, and he is as dark and cold as a snuffed star. That’s what gets to him the most—not how cold the morgue is under its colorless fluorescent lighting, or the cloying smell of formaldehyde that clogs his throat. It’s how still Dick is, on the cold, sterile surface of the examiner’s table. It’s unnatural. The boy never learned how to sit still.---On a dewy Sunday morning in April, Dick Grayson, trust fund baby and local celebrity, is found dead at the tender age of 25. His abrupt passing sends his hometown, the sleepy beach town of Gotham, into a tizzy--and his former guardian, old money stalwart Bruce Wayne, reeling. But as Bruce struggles to come to terms with his ward's death, it rapidly becomes clearer and clearer to him that there's something off with this tragedy--no, this "town"--no, this entirereality...





	leave as though fire burns under your feet

_2:21 am  
_ _April 2nd_

 

Bruce wakes, hard and fast, in the dead of night.

Moonlight frames the windows of the master suite, bringing to life a myriad of shadows that fills the far end of his empty bedroom. His breath catches in his throat and threatens to suffocate him. In that second, he can feel himself hurtling towards the edge; the abyss, dark where it awaits him, is terrifying in its familiarity. But then the years of therapy kick in, a jumpstart to his broken system. He forces himself to draw in a deep, shuddering breath, and then another, and another. The haze starts to dissipate from his mind. After a few breaths more, he can think clearly again.

Instinctively, he rolls over and reaches for his phone. The time flashes up at him in neon white. Fuck, it’s early. Or is it late? Bruce stares down at the screen, fighting an internal war. It’s a hellish time; if he wakes Dick up, he’ll never forgive himself. But he knows his own mind: He knows that the balance he’s struck is a precarious one, that it won’t take much, if anything, to send him reeling again. And if there’s anyone who’s good at the balancing act, it’s Dick.

 _I had the dream again,_ he types out. He hits send before he can stop himself. Just the act itself feels like an elephant stepping off his chest. He slumps against the headboard, willing to wait however long it takes for Dick to respond.

Which, apparently, is twenty seconds. The phone vibrates in Bruce’s hand. He frowns down at it, almost outraged that he got what he wanted so quickly. _deep breaths,_ Dick’s message reminds him, gently. _u want me to come over?_

Bruce scowls. _Why are you awake?_

He can almost hear the wind-chime brightness of Dick’s laugh. _u were the one who texted me, b._

_I didn’t expect you to respond immediately. Are you still up?_

_nope! we talked abt this. no interrogation allowed_. Bruce rolls his eyes.

_Fine. You need to keep a better sleep schedule._

_hypocrite,_ Dick snipes. Then, _u want me to say it?_

_…Yes._

_jason is alive and healthy. tim is okay. damian is doing well. everyone is okay._

Bruce shudders and closes his eyes. It’s that dream, that damn dream. The one where Jason is already dead when Bruce gets to him. The one where Bruce burns his hands down to the bone as he pulls his foster kid’s body out of a smouldering wreckage, little face so damaged that it’s barely recognizable. He’s been having it for years, but it wakes him up in a cold sweat every time. Every damn time.

In reality, Jason pulled himself out of the crumpled heap of his car, called the ambulance for both himself and the drunk driver that had hit him head-on; in reality, he came out of that night with only some scarring from the third degree burn on his shoulder and a lingering discomfort behind the wheel. In reality, Jason is alive and well and living in an apartment down by the water, probably sound asleep in his own bed.

But the dream stays the same. No matter how much Bruce tries to escape it.

Bruce reads Dick’s text over and over again, until the cold, slick fear loosens its grip around his spine. He takes a deep, steadying breath, counts back from twelve in an even drummer’s tempo. _Thank you._

 _ofc,_ Dick replies. _have u told him yet?_

_He doesn’t want to hear about this._

_ur such a dolt._ Bruce rolls his eyes, but his mouth curves with fondness despite himself. _u could check up on him urself, u know, instead of always sending me. i’m running out of excuses for why i keep showing up at his place._

_He doesn’t mind seeing you. He does mind seeing me. He thinks it means I don’t trust him to take care of himself._

_he doesn’t, he’s just stubborn. i wonder where he gets it from._

Bruce smiles. _Alright,_ he relents. _I’ll try, the next time I see him._

Dick replies with a trail of beaming emojis. _proud of u._

_So long as you promise to get more sleep._

There’s a pause, unusual for Dick. When he does respond, it’s with a simple thumbs-up emoji. _will do. night, b._

_Good night._

 

 _10:14 am_ _  
_ _April 2nd_

Carrie from the cleaning company wakes up him up at quarter past ten with a prim knock, waiting until he calls out a groggy response before peeking her head through the door. “Morning, Mr. Wayne,” she chirps. She’s a sweet girl, twenty-three with a headful of red hair that she never seems to know what to do with, but her voice stabs like a knife into the soft matter of his sleep-deprived brain. “I’m about done downstairs; I can come back later to do the upstairs if you’re—”

“No, no, I’m up.” Bruce pushes himself upright and arcs his back until it yields with a satisfying pop. “Are the kids here yet?”

“Yessir. Tim is in the kitchen. I think I saw Jason pulling up in the driveway.”

“Okay. You can start with the rest of the rooms upstairs. I’ll be out of your way in a minute.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Wayne.”

The door clicks closed. Bruce releases a sigh. Carrie is efficient and thorough, and kinder to Bruce and his half-scattered brain than he deserves, but she’s no Alfred. Two years out, Bruce still misses the old man with the pain of a phantom limb.

Tim and Jason are already in the kitchen when Bruce arrives. Yellow sun, bleach-bright and unrelenting, makes the white marble backsplash seem to glow; the air is steamy from hot coffee and cooking eggs. Jason looks up from the island as Bruce shuffles in. He’s wearing a pair of engine oil-stained jeans and a well-fitting white t-shirt, dark hair still damp from a shower. In his mind’s eye, Bruce sees him in the early hours of the morning, jogging along the beach.

“Well, well, well, look who’s up.” Jason’s grin is as sharp as the knife he’s using to portion out the bacon. “A lifetime of partying finally catching up to you, old man?”

“Watch who you’re calling old,” Bruce growls. He pours himself a cup of the freshly made coffee and swallows half of it black. “Is Dick here yet?”

“Nope,” Tim says. Unlike Jason, he’s in a rumpled collared shirt and a cardigan, and he looks like he can’t have woken up more than half an hour ago. He’s flipping idly through the free copies of _The_ _Gotham Gazette_ that they give out at the local coffeeshops. Front and center on the outfacing page is yet another photograph of Dick, this time accompanied by a woman with long, dark hair, taken with a long-distance lens outside one of the more upscale restaurants downtown. Dick has his head lowered, eyes hidden behind a pair of sunglasses; the woman is aiming a glare at the camera. The headline above the picture reads _Is Wayne Industries heir in a new relationship?_ “No response to my texts, either. Did he say anything about not being able to make it today?”

Bruce checks his phone and frowns. “No, nothing.” It’s not out of character for Dick to be late to their weekly Sunday brunch, but it is unlike him not to at least herald his delayed arrival with a sheepish text beforehand. Bruce restrains himself, barely, from sending a text that he knows will only sound accusatory. “He was up late last night. My guess is he overslept.”

Jason rolls his eyes. “You and the Dickster, and Timmy, too. When are the Waynes going to realize they’re not actually nocturnal?”

Bruce’s mouth twitches. It still feels good, even after all these years, to hear the plural of his name.

“You do realize you’re the only one Bruce actually adopted, right?”

“Yeah, but fortunately my inherent coolness saved me from absorbing all of his bad habits. You and Dick were, tragically, left defenseless.”

“You are the _least_ cool kid Bruce has ever fostered, you read _The Elements of Style_ for fun—”

“Fool! Good grammar is the coolest thing you can have, did Alfred teach you nothing?”

Bruce’s phone rings, then, saving him from the responsibility of stopping Tim from throwing eggs into Jason’s hair. He neatly side-steps his bickering foster children and takes the call, the stubborn smile still on his mouth. “Bruce Wayne speaking.”

“Bruce.” The rasp on the other end of the line is familiar: Jim Gordon, captain of Gotham’s sole police precinct and a friend to Bruce since he was ten years old. “Do you have a moment to talk?”

“Jim.” Bruce ducks out of the kitchen, leaving Tim and Jason to destroy the kitchen as they see fit. “Of course. What’s going on?”

There’s a dozen reasons why Jim Gordon could be calling him on a Sunday midmorning. Gotham, New Jersey is a sleepy beach town that only gets busy at the peak of summer, but something about its proximity to the city and the streams of tourists that seasonally triple its population make it a hotspot for petty crime—break-ins, burglaries, carjackings and muggings. The sedate nature of the town also breeds runaways: In the past year alone, at least a dozen kids left their various houses and group homes and never returned, most likely to the city or the opposite coast. Bruce gave up his parents’ company a long time ago, but he’s still got a tight grip on the Wayne Foundation, and one of the foundation’s pet projects is providing legal representation and rehabilitation programs for nonviolent offenders. Gordon calls him about once a month, to maintain ties between the precinct’s office and the Foundation.

There’s a long moment of silence on the other end, long enough that Bruce wonders if the call has been dropped. “Jim?” he tries again. “Are you there?”

When Gordon speaks again, his voice is rough and strained, like he’s been shouting. “Bruce,” he says, and it’s unsteady, trembling at the edges. In the time it takes Bruce to blink, dread, cold as ice, slips down his spine. Jim Gordon is rock-steady; a hurricane couldn’t blow that man over. “I think—I think you should sit down.”

The warmth of the morning evaporates from Bruce’s body. He is left stone-cold, frigid with fear. “What’s happened.”

“Bruce—”

“Tell me. Now.”

Gordon draws in a shaking breath and speaks. The coffee mug slips from Bruce’s fingers and shatters on the floor.

 

 _10:51 am_ _  
_ _April 2nd_

Ever since he was a child, Dick Grayson was beautiful. Blue eyes, gold skin, hair dark and fine as raven feathers. But it was more than that, more than the looks, more than even the easy grace of the limbs he inherited from his circus-acrobat parents. He had a light in him that burned so bright it was impossible to ignore, shedding warmth on everything it touched. It was one of the reasons the local gossip sites were obsessed with him, even as a child: Besides his exotic, alluringly tragic background as an orphaned circus performer, he had the kind of personality that drew people to him instantly. He had darkness in him, too, but it wasn’t like the darkness in Bruce. It wasn’t a weakness; it only made him stronger, more disciplined.

That glow is gone, now. Gone from Dick’s skin, gone from inside him. It used to shine out of him, out of all the cracks the world put in him. But now Bruce looks down at him, and he is as dark and cold as a snuffed star. That’s what gets to him the most—not how cold the morgue is under its colorless fluorescent lighting, or the cloying smell of formaldehyde that clogs his throat. It’s how still Dick is, on the cold, sterile surface of the examiner’s table. It’s unnatural. The boy never learned how to sit still.

“It’s him.” The words fall out flat and stilted, jagged at the edges. “That’s Dick Grayson.”

Gordon turns away. The medical examiner sighs and draws the sheet back up over Dick’s face. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Mr. Wayne,” she murmurs. “We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

Bruce leaves the cold, windowless room holding his dead son inside it, finds the nearest trash can on the sidewalk outside, and empties his stomach into it.

 

 _11:01 am_ _  
_ _April 2nd_

Bruce first realized how much he had come to rely on Dick when the boy went abroad on fellowship for half a year and Bruce woke up one morning four months in to realize he had stopped talking to everyone in his life but Alfred. It scared him: He hadn’t needed anyone for a long time, not since his parents died in an alleyway while he sat at home watching _Texas Ranger_ reruns. He spent the year after Dick’s return pushing him away, until Dick was seventeen and grown and there was an unfathomable distance between them, a chasm that felt impossible to cross when all Bruce could see when he looked at Dick was still a little boy. The morning Dick left for college, he set his trunk down in the foyer and came into Bruce’s study, waited there until Bruce couldn’t ignore him anymore. When Bruce finally looked at up him, he met Bruce’s gaze, blue and unwavering, and said, voice steady, “I don’t want to end us like this, Bruce.” Bruce remembers wondering, in that moment, who had taught Dick to be as strong as he was. “But I will, if I have to. If that’s really what you want.”

And for a while after, Bruce was alone again, in his dark house on the high hill overlooking the waters of the sleepy town of Gotham. And then, one night, a dirty, scrawny fourteen-year-old ran away from his overcrowded foster home in the city and tried to steal Bruce’s car.

The Jason of now is barely recognizable compared to the Jason of then. The skittish, malnourished kid, suspicious of everything and everyone, is gone. In his place is a hale, brawny twenty-two-year-old, one who’s not afraid to show concern on his face when he meets Bruce’s eyes. “B?”

Bruce looks at Jason, sitting in the driver’s seat of the Camaro Bruce gave him for his twenty-first birthday, to replace the one he lost when he was sixteen. He remembers the sand that filled his mouth when he got the call that night, the way the world narrowed into a dark and ashy tunnel as Dick rushed them both into the city. The moment he laid eyes on Jason in that hospital bed, the fear in his throat grew so big he had to get it out; but he has never been able to get the poison out of himself without burning someone else. He remembers the words that came after, vipers born from his own terror: _This is why you don’t sneak out. This is why you don’t go anywhere without telling me or Alfred. I told you not go to see her, I told you it wouldn’t be safe. If I knew you were going to be this irresponsible, I never would have trusted you to—_

Bruce still thinks that maybe the only reason why he still has a relationship with Jason at all after that night is because Dick dragged him out of the room then, mouth tight and eyes blazing. He pushed him down into a chair in the waiting room, brow furrowed with thunderous disapproval, and hissed at him to “get a _hold_ of yourself, B. That’s your kid in there, and he’s just been hurt, and he’s scared. So you either figure out what it is you really want to say to him, or you don’t say anything to him at all.”

And now Jason is here, expression growing increasingly worried by the second, and Dick isn’t. Jason is here, and Dick—Dick is gone.

Bruce opens his mouth. “I told you to wait for me at the house.”

“Yeah, well. You know patience was never one of my virtues.” Jason only hesitates a second before popping open the door and climbing out of the car. He approaches Bruce slowly, hands held out placatingly. Even with how fraught their relationship was at first, one of the first things Dick taught Jason when Jason came to live at the manor was how to handle one of Bruce’s dissociative fits. He’s carrying out the same technique now, even after all these years: A slow approach, a calm tone. “You don’t look so good, B. What’s going on?”

Bruce looks beyond Jason’s shoulder. Tim is sitting in the passenger seat, watching them. His expression is neutral, but—there’s something like dread, creeping into those careful eyes. Dick has always been the best at reading Bruce, but Tim is a close second. Bruce wonders if he can somehow see the truth etched on Bruce’s face. _He must be able to,_ Bruce thinks; knows it with the flat conviction of fact. He left the station with his insides torn out, a different person now and forever. He can’t fathom how it has not changed him on the outside as well.

“Bruce,” Jason repeats. His hand finds Bruce’s elbow. He really has come such an incredible way. There was a time when Jason refused to let anyone touch him. “C’mon, you’re scaring me. What’s wrong? Is it one of the Foundation kids?”

At last, at last, Bruce finds the strength to meet Jason’s eyes. He can feel himself shutting down. He hasn’t done this in a while now, hasn’t needed to, but it comes back to him with perfect ease: The parts of him that Dick always fought so hard to keep alive shuttering and darkening, cooling into a shell hard enough to keep him from shattering. “It’s Dick,” he says. His voice does not sound like his own; his body feels like it is being controlled by someone else, and he is drifting somewhere just outside it. “He’s…he…”

Jason looks from Bruce to the precinct and back again. His face has gone pale. “Bruce. Where’s Dick?”

“A jogger found him on her morning run,” Bruce hears himself say. He knows, distantly, that he is handling this situation poorly; that there is a better way to tell him, that Jason deserves that. “He was in the woods, in a shallow creek just off the path. He had been hit in the head, once, with a blunt object—”

Jason reels away from him. “ _No_.”

“According to the medical examiner, it was about seven hours ago. She doesn’t know what, exactly, happened yet, but she’s—she’s willing to confirm that cause of death was not accidental.”

For a moment, Jason just stares at him, flat shock bleeding into disbelief. “You—no,” he says, breathless. “No. Is this—is this some kind of sick joke? Because if it is, it’s really not fucking funny—”

“Jason.” There’s a lump in his throat that makes it hard to speak, and even harder to breathe. Bruce doesn’t feel much, but he does feel that. “I saw the body. It’s him. It’s him.”

Jason’s mouth trembles—and then his entire face collapses, a crumbling rampart falling into an ocean of unimaginable grief. He takes a step back, then another. “Jesus. _Jesus_.”

Tim is watching them through the car window, eyes wide and face drained of color. He can’t hear them from this distance, but Bruce can see it in his eyes, those eyes that see everything: He knows. “He’s—he’s gone, Jason,” Bruce says. The words in his throat feel like choking on blood. He doesn’t know why the sensation seems so familiar. “Dick is dead.”

 

 _9:49 am_ _  
_ _April 3rd_

 

The media explodes. It always does whenever Dick is concerned, and his death is no different. The _New York Times_ is the first to break the news: _Former child model and heir to Wayne Industries dead at 25_ ; although the headline is respectful, the body of the text itself indicates “suspicious circumstances surrounding his death.” Shortly thereafter, the _Gotham Gazette_ declares, in a fit of aghast shock, _Dickie Grayson found DEAD!?_ The article wastes no time in snatching up the open thread left by the _Times_ and wondering, in tones of exaggerated horror, if foul play couldn’t have played a role in the tragical and untimely passing of New Jersey’s beloved local celebrity. After that, the internet floods with rumors. Some of them suggest that Dick Grayson overdosed, the favorite fate of beautiful rising stars who die too young. Others insist that Dick, who left the celebrity lifestyle behind a long time ago and was leading a quiet career as a social worker for years now, wouldn’t have overdosed—obviously he was stalked and killed, by an unstable fan who never quite let go of an old obsession, or perhaps a vengeful ex. The most fervent theories posit that Dick was involved in some sort of criminal enterprise, and that his death came at the hands of an untraceable international mercenary.

In the hours after the news breaks, the landline at the manor rings incessantly, flooded with calls from Gotham townies who grew up under the Wayne legacy. Dr. Leslie Thompkins, who used to give Bruce his yearly well-child check-ups and bandaged Dick’s sprained wrists and twisted ankles whenever he hurt himself during gymnastics practice, sends flowers, her deepest sympathies, and a gentle reminder to Bruce not to forget to take care of himself during this time, because she knows him too well. Edward Nygma, the librarian, shares his condolences and a copy of Dick’s favorite book as a child, _The Princess Bride,_ by courier. Vicki Vale, the _Gazette_ ’s gossip columnist, who made Dick’s life a living hell any time he so much as looked at an attractive woman, calls twice, asking for an interview with Bruce and a barrage of questions about Dick’s death both times.

Jason and Tim take the first few calls, but by mid-afternoon, Tim has taken the phone off the cradle, and Jason is nowhere to be found.

 

 _2:49 pm_ _  
_ _April 3rd_

If you had told Bruce at twenty-three years of age that he would one day be a sort of father to four children, he would have looked at you with eyes haunted by the ghosts of a lonely, grief-stricken childhood and laughed. “Four?” he would have said, incredulous and sneering. “Funny. I can barely take care of myself.”

If you had told him the same thing a year later, he would have looked away from the little boy he was trying to coax down from the chandelier in his foyer with a different kind of fear in his eyes, one born of hope. “Four?” Watch him as he laughs again, self-deprecating, vulnerable. “Let’s see if I can keep one alive first.”

Dick Grayson changed everything for Bruce. Dick Grayson had the tendency to do that.

Dick hasn’t lived with Bruce since he was a teenager, but in the slow hours after his death, the house seems empty without him. The inside of the manor feels like a vacuum, sucking out all air inside and leaving only a void behind. Bruce shuts himself into his study, locks the door, and draws the curtains over the windows. Then he lies on the long leather couch and stares at the ceiling, thoughts gratifyingly empty. Occasionally he will remember Dick, aged ten, falling asleep curled on the same couch while Bruce spent the night pouring over work contracts; or Dick, naked on a cold metal slab, and the fact that Bruce will never see the starburst blue of his eyes ever again. But mostly, there is nothing, merciful nothing.

Sometime afterwards, he is brought back to his body by the sound of a knock on the door. “Bruce.” Gordon’s voice drifts through. “Can we talk?”

Bruce closes his eyes. He considers telling Gordon to go; or better yet, just lying there, unresponsive, until his oldest friend loses patience and leaves. But in the end, he gets up off the couch and opens the door.

Gordon looks almost as bad as Bruce feels. He pushes a hand through his disheveled hair and lets out a sigh, a ragged sound. “Can I come in?”

Bruce lets Gordon into the study while he pulls back the windows. It’s overcast outside, the sky cloudy and bruised. Gordon sits on the couch with his elbows on his knees. Bruce settles into the armchair across from him.

Gordon stares at the floor, jaw working. For a while, they sit in silence. At last, he looks up at Bruce. He looks older than the way Bruce pictures him in his mind, like the events of the past day have worn years from his life. “You must know how sorry I am,” he rasps, quietly. “You must.”

Bruce swallows. His own voice is rough when it comes out. “Does Barbara know?”

Gordon scrubs a hand over his face. “I told her this morning. She was—she took it hard. Understandably. Wanted me to tell you she’s sorry and that she’s coming back from D.C. for the funeral.”

“The funeral?”

“The funeral for—”

“Oh.” Bruce hadn’t even thought of that, though he should have. He’s planned enough funerals in his lifetime. “Yes. We’ll have it when—when the coroner is done with the body.”

Gordon nods, slowly. “Bruce.” His voice is hesitant, pained. “I have to ask. Do you have any, _any_ idea why someone would do this to him?”

And the thing is, Bruce doesn’t. He built his entire life so that he could always have the answers, but he has no answers, no idea for why anyone would want to murder his ward—his _child_ . Dick Grayson, the most stalwart, painfully compassionate person Bruce knew. Bruce shakes his head. “You knew him, Jim,” he says, almost disbelieving. “He was a gymnast, he was a social worker, he was— _Dick_ . Everyone loved him. Why would someone—why would _anyone_ —  It doesn’t make any sense. It just—doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know, Bruce. You know I loved Dick. But…” Gordon sighs. “My deputy told me that he had been hounding her these past couple of weeks. He kept asking questions about the kids that went missing. And a week ago, the agency he worked at reported that several of their case files had gone missing. Do you think Dick could have been trying to find those kids?”

Bruce stares at him. _Dick…trying to find…?_ The words take a while to sink into his comprehension, but when they do, they leave a dark, inky trail behind, like something bleeding into water. _Dick, trying to find…_

Gordon’s brow furrows. “We searched his apartment and didn’t find the files, so there’s no real reason to believe he took them. Besides, even if he did, it’d be a stretch to assume he somehow got so involved in whatever happened to those kids that it got him into trouble. He’s always been too obsessed with saving people, your boy—but he wouldn’t be so reckless, would he?”

A film-reel sequence of events begins to play out in Bruce’s head. He is the only person in a dark theater, and on the screen is a version of reality that might or might not be true, silent and colorless, unfolding rapidly before his eyes while all he can do is watch. A feeling settles in his stomach, a strange, knowing feeling. It is part instinct and part premonition, steeped in dread. He looks at Gordon and smiles without humor.

“Like father, like son,” he says.

 

 _11:58 pm_ _  
_ _April 4th_

“You work too much, B.”

The words are so familiar that for a moment, Bruce is shunted back in time—to a decade ago, to last year, to last week. To Dick leaning in the doorway of his study, expression equal parts frustration and exasperation. “B,” he’d repeat, louder, even knowing full well that Bruce heard him the first time. “Are you listening to me?”

Bruce would grunt, then, eyes never leaving his computer screen, and say something along the lines of, “It’d be somewhat difficult not to,” or “Despite my best efforts”; something that would never fail to make Dick roll his eyes, despite the fact that he was about ten years into being immune to Bruce’s acerbity by now.

“You’re retired, Bruce,” Dick would inevitably point out. “Can’t you act like it?”

And then Bruce would dictate to Dick how he had stepped down as the CEO of Wayne Industries, but not as one of its primary consultants; and how there was still the Foundation to be managed, too, and that just because it was a nonprofit did not mean it wasn’t a full-time job to run it; and then Dick would heave a dramatic sigh, far less upset than he pretended to be, and leave Bruce to “grow old and sad and gray alone in your office, if that’s what you really want”; and inevitably return, no more than an hour later, with a sandwich and a cup of black tea, as close to the way Alfred used to make it as he could get.

And maybe, if Bruce was good that day—if his thoughts were clear and the very idea of speaking to another human didn’t make him want to raise his hackles and snarl—he might look up to meet Dick’s eyes and remind him that he should take a moment for himself to make sure he didn’t follow too closely in Bruce’s footsteps.

But the eyes Bruce meets now are not Dick’s. Jason frowns at him from the doorway. He looks exhausted, deep bruises under his eyes. Bruce finds it in himself to feel a pang of guilt that they’ve barely spoken since returning from the precinct together, when Jason announced that he and Tim would stay at the manor, and Bruce told them to do what they liked.

“When was the last time you slept?”

Bruce feels his own mouth twist into a frown. “I told Lucius I’d give him my review on the DS Enterprises merger by Monday.”

Jason looks almost angry. “Your kid just _died_ , Bruce. I think Lucius will fucking understand.”

“Because I have had a family tragedy, it no longer matters if the merger falls through and thousands of my employees lose their jobs?”

“For fuck’s sake. That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

Bruce just stares at him. “Did you want something?”

Jason’s lip curls. “I called Talia. She’s sending Damian back on the next flight out of London.”

Bruce’s eyes narrow. “I told you not to call her.”

“They have the right to know.”

“There’s no point in Talia sending Damian back when he doesn’t want to be here.”

Jason rolls his eyes. “Damian wanted to come back. He made the decision himself.”

That stalls Bruce. He opens his mouth, then closes it again. “Why?”

“I don’t know; maybe, against all odds, he _hasn’t_ inherited your genetic sociopathy and wants to be here for his foster brother’s funeral.”

Bruce frowns. “They barely knew each other.”

Jason’s mouth tightens. “Well, you can ask him yourself. His flight comes in tomorrow morning. Tim and I are going to pick him up.”

Bruce returns his gaze to his spreadsheet of resource allocation numbers. “Very well.”

Jason pauses on his way out. He glances over his shoulder, most of his face obscured. “He wouldn’t want this, you know.”

“Who?”

“Dick.” Jason’s voice catches. “He’d hate what you’re doing to yourself.”

Bruce doesn’t look up. “Your argument is flawed,” he returns, evenly. “Dick doesn’t want anything anymore. He’s dead.”

Silence. The next time Bruce looks up, Jason is gone.

 

 _12:41 pm_ _  
_ _April 5th_

People say that Damian looks just like Bruce, but when Bruce looks at his only biological child’s face, all he sees is Talia. The brown-green eyes, the olive skin, the round, lilting cadence of his accent—it is impossible not to see in him the woman Bruce once thought he could have loved, before she hid the existence of their child from him for ten years.

Damian sets his suitcase down in the foyer and tilts his chin up. “Father,” he says. “I regretted to hear of Grayson’s passing. He was…a respectable man. Most of the time.”

Bruce’s brows go up. “That’s kind of you to say, Damian. You didn’t have to come.”

“I wanted to. School is not in session, and…” Damian clears his throat. “I wanted to pay my respects.”

“The funeral won’t be happening for a while,” Bruce says, robotically. “Not until the police are done with the body.”

“Yes. Well. Regardless,” Damian says. “I do not mind waiting.”

Tim appears in the hallway. His gaze slides between Bruce and Damian. “Jason made lunch.”

Bruce clears his throat. “I’m not hungry. But Damian will join you.”

Tim blinks at him, unimpressed. “Jason made lunch for all of us. And Carrie needs to clean your study. So you might as well come and sit in the kitchen. You can not eat there just as well as at your desk.”

Tim turns and marches from the foyer. Bruce exhales, endlessly exhausted, but allows himself to be led into the kitchen. Jason stands at the stove, stirring a steaming pot. Bowls of peas with mint and seasoned yellow rice are already waiting on the table. “Sit,” Jason calls out without turning. “Food’s almost done.”

Bruce sits at the head of the table, Tim and Damian on either side of him. For a split second, he is seized by the conviction that if he looks up, Dick will be sitting at the other end, cajoling Tim into drinking juice instead of coffee or chatting with Damian about his latest art project. But the chair is empty. The moment leaves him feeling strange and angry, betrayed by his own mind.

Jason sets a serving platter heaped with ropa vieja on the table and slides into the chair next to Tim. “Eat,” he barks.

Tim reaches for the rice. Damian turns to Bruce. “Father,” he begins. “Todd did not tell me much over the phone. Have there been any developments in Grayson’s case?”

The clinking of silverware abruptly ceases. Tim stares at Jason; Jason stares down at the table. Slowly, Bruce puts down his fork.

“As far as I have been made aware,” he gets out, like stones grinding between cogs, “there have not been any new developments in the case of Dick’s death.”

“And there are no leads, as of yet?” Damian presses. “The police do not have a working theory of why Grayson died?”

Bruce breathes, slowly, in through his nose and out again. “Not that I know of, no.”

“How far are they into their investigation? Have they questioned—?”

Jason clears his throat, loudly. “No one’s told us anything yet, kid,” he cuts in, the hard edge to his voice leaving no room for interpretation. “You know we would’ve told you if they did. Why do you want to know so bad, anyway?”

Damian draws back. After a moment, he shrugs. “I admit that I did not know Grayson as well as you all did. The time we spent together was limited. But when I heard of his passing, I was surprised by how…bereft I felt. He was always kind to me, and he was…competent, underneath that act he put on. I suppose I felt that his death was a shame.” His eyes narrow. “Besides. He was Father’s first and most trusted ward. That makes him one of us. And Mother always taught me that we avenge our own.”

Tim drags his fork through the untouched rice on his plate. “ _Great_ lesson to teach a thirteen-year-old.”

“Dick may have been trying to find the missing runaways.”

Three pair of eyes snap onto Bruce. “What?” Jason demands.

Bruce puts down his fork. “Gordon told me that Dick had been asking his deputy questions about the runaways. And a week ago, the case files his agency had been keeping on them went missing from their office.”

Tim’s eyes are wide. “I thought you said the police didn’t have any theories on why—”

“They don’t. But they don’t know Dick like I do.” Bruce has been resolutely ignoring his own thoughts for the past twenty hours, shoving aside the implications that Gordon’s visit left him with. But now, outside the numbing void of his study, they surface in the light and present him with their stark truth. Bruce has never known Dick to let go of a bone. And now, he might have finally dug one up connected to a skeleton. “And they won’t find the truth like I will.”

 

 _8:55 pm_ _  
_ _April 6th_

Anyone without an intimate knowledge of how Bruce works might be surprised at the sudden change in his primary coping strategy. To go from utter nothingness to sudden, intense focus—the path from one to the other is a difficult one to understand. But Bruce’s mind has always only had two settings: He does not engage at all, or he is obsessed. It’s been this way since he was a child, since even before his parents’ deaths, when most of his other issues began. Over the years he learned to work past one end of it, to take meetings he had no interest in and study proposals that didn’t have nearly enough numbers for his liking; but the obsessiveness never went away. It used to be Alfred’s job to pry Bruce away from his work and force him to eat, or sleep, or attend a social event. And then, when Alfred grew too old and tired to put up with much of Bruce’s bullshit anymore, it was Dick’s.

Bruce supposes he shouldn’t be surprised when he steps through the front door of Dick’s modest downtown apartment and finds Jason and Tim already there, sitting on the couch with flashlights in each hand. He flicks on the lights and stares at them, unimpressed. Tim, at least, has the grace to look somewhat sheepish; Jason returns Bruce’s gaze with what can only be described as open defiance.

Bruce lets out a long, slow breath and resists the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “ _Why_ do you have flashlights?”

Tim grimaces. “Yeah…for some reason, when I pictured us sneaking around Dick’s apartment, it was in the dark.”

Jason rolls his eyes. “We’re not ‘sneaking around,’” he snaps. “I’ve got a goddamn key.”

An unexpected revelation: Bruce wasn’t aware Dick and Jason were that close. He files the tidbit away for later. “Then why, exactly, are you here?”

Jason’s eyes go steely. “For the same reason you are.”

“You were right, Bruce,” Tim says quietly. “The police—even Sheriff Gordon—don’t know Dick like we do. We owe it to him to at least try, don’t we?”

Bruce swallows. He almost forgot, in the muddying mire of his grief, how much Dick meant to not just him, but Tim as well; how Tim, who had withdrawn so deeply into himself when he first came to live with Bruce that he barely spoke, only began to open up once Dick started taking him out for ice cream and giving him nicknames. He clears his throat and looks away, so that he will not have to look at Jason and Tim. “You two take the kitchen and common area. I’ll search the bedroom.”

Tim looks relieved. Even Jason’s defensiveness recedes, letting the quiet, exhausted grief beneath show through. He stands and tips a nod to Bruce, an acknowledgement. “Let us know if you find anything.”

It is nothing short of painful, standing in Dick’s bedroom knowing that its inhabitant will never return to it. Bruce has to take a moment to simply breathe after he steps through the door. There is Dick’s Flying Graysons poster hanging in its frame above his bed; there is the handbook of Romani fairy tales that he keeps on his nightstand, to flip through whenever the language starts to fade from his mind; there is the battered bookshelf filled with sociology textbooks and statistics manuals, the cardboard box of computer parts underneath the desk. Dick was always good with numbers and machines, better even than Bruce sometimes, and Bruce once thought that he might get a degree in economics or finance, so that he could inherit Wayne Industries one day. But that wasn’t Dick, the kid who could barely tolerate three hours in a suit and tie when Bruce used to bring him along to company galas, the kid who skipped prom to volunteer at the Foundation’s holiday soup kitchen, even though he and Bruce were barely on speaking terms then. Dick always wanted to help people. Always _needed_ to help people.

“Bruce.” Tim’s voice draws Bruce out of the mire of his thoughts. The boy slips inside Dick’s room and eases the door mostly shut behind him. “Find anything?”

Bruce clears his throat and turns away from Dick’s bookshelf. “Nothing of note. Where’s Jason?”

“In the sitting room,” Tim says. “He looked like he needed a moment, so I gave it to him.” Bruce’s brows rise at that, but before he can ask, Tim is pointing towards the dresser. “That’s pretty. It looks familiar.”

Bruce follows Tim’s gaze to a small, glazed pottery dish sitting next to Dick’s deodorant and collection of hair pomades. It’s a creamy, speckled seafoam green, riveted by lines of gold ore. “It should. Barbara made that for him when she was going through her pottery phase in high school. She made the vases in the manor foyer, too.”

Tim crosses the room to pick up the dish. It’s filled with a handful of coins and a collection of loose keys. He frowns as he fishes one out. “I wonder what this is for.”

Bruce holds out a hand, and Tim wordlessly passes it over. Unlike the other keys in the dish—house keys and mailbox keys, and one for a bike lock—this one is short and stout, with a teethless, tubular shaft and a black rubber head. “It’s a disc lock key,” Bruce says, before he can think.

Tim blinks. “Is it?”

“Of the same kind that are industry standard for commercial storage units.”  

“It’s a bit scratched up,” Tim says. “It looks like it’s been used pretty frequently.”

Bruce lowers the key. He feels like something has woken up in the back of his mind, something just now taking its first breath after years of being stifled. It unsettles him enough that he searches automatically for a distraction. “When did you get so observant?’

Tim raises a brow. “Says the man who is apparently an industry expert on locks. Do you rent storage units? I was under the impression all of the Wayne family heirlooms were in a high security vault somewhere.”

“They are. I suppose I—must have picked it up somewhere.” Bruce stares down at the key. The itch persists, strange yet familiar all at once. “We should find the storage unit this opens.”

Tim’s head lilts. There something in his eyes, too, something surfacing past the grief. “You think there could be something there?”

Bruce’s hand curls around the key. “I don’t know. But it seems…foolish, not to check, doesn’t it?”

Tim smiles. “I know what you mean,” he says. “Come on. Jason will drive.”

 

 _3:16 am_ _  
_ _April 7th_

“Alright; this is the last one in New Jersey,” Tim says, as Jason pulls the Camaro up outside the darkened offices of Tristate Storage Solutions. “If this one’s a bust, we can move on to the ones in New York.”

“If this one’s a bust, we can go home, sleep, and try again in the morning.” Jason kills the engine and stares mulishly up at the facility’s neon yellow sign. “I can’t believe the two of you have got me hauling your asses all over the state in the middle of the night for a hunch.”

Tim glances at Bruce. He shrugs. “Sometimes you’ve got to follow your instincts.”

“It wasn’t a hunch, it was a logical conclusion,” Bruce returns, for no reason other than it seeming like an important distinction. He shakes himself and gets out of the car. “Come on. It’s getting late.”

They search the units of Tristate Storage Solutions as they did with the other three facilities: One by one, each wielding one of the three copies of the key that Bruce had made at the hardware store before they set out. This late into the night, the facility is steeped in shadows, pitch-dark with the suggestion of threats lurking just beyond view. Bruce finds himself constantly checking over his shoulder, gaze sweeping between the exits, paying attention to things like the whisper of wind between the units and the shuffle of Tim and Jason’s footsteps for reasons he can’t quite explain. He finds himself annoyed that he didn’t look up the blueprints of the facility beforehand, then confused a second later as to how he would have even acquired something like that.

“Bruce!” Tim’s voice rings out with excitement. “I found it! Oh my god, I found it.”

Bruce is at Tim’s side almost before he has the disc lock holding storage unit number 405 closed and tossed aside. Jason heaves the door open with a clunk that echoes through the facility, and Tim shines his flashlight on the inside.

Bruce doesn’t know why he’s not surprised by what he sees. He should be, he knows—he should be horrified. But he isn’t. He isn’t at all.

Jason sucks in a sharp breath. “Dickie,” he murmurs, so quiet Bruce nearly misses it. “What the fuck did you get yourself into?”

All four walls of the storage unit are papered, floor to ceiling, in photographs, newspaper articles, sheets of printed records. In the center of the left-hand wall are sixteen photographs, all of children that went missing in the past year. Strands of red, green, and yellow yarn spider-web off from the photos, connecting the faces to the meticulous groupings of notes that cover the other three walls. A folding table in the corner has been piled with even more files. Bruce recognizes the logo of the aid agency where Dick worked, the Haven Collective, on the files’ covers.

Bruce starts at the wall with the children’s photos and works his way around, following the pathways Dick created. At first glance, the display is chaos, evidence of an obsession, maybe even a sickness; but the more Bruce looks, the clearer Dick’s thought process becomes, until he reaches the connecting dot that at all the others lead to and it feels as if he has read a collegiate thesis. _REAL ESTATE MOGUL OPENS CASINO ON BEACHFRONT PROPER_ , reads the headline, at the center of it all. Beneath it, the byline: _Sleepy New Jersey beach town transforms into a destination for wealthy internationals thanks to new initiatives by heir to the Sionis property empire_.

Jason is scanning the wall of runaways, fists curling at his sides. “They’re all the same,” he’s saying, an edge sharpening in his voice. “Low-income homes, if they’ve got any family at all; trying to get away from the group homes in the city if they don’t. Too old to be adopted, too young to support themselves—the ones no one’s looking for, the ones no one’s gonna miss—”

Tim is flipping through one of the unmarked files on the folding table. The color drains from his face with each new document. “These are wire transfers between the Sionis Property Group and—just—a ton of different international accounts.” He looks up, scanning the printed-out records tacked up next to the runaways. “And each of them is dated less than a week after the Haven Collective reported one of these kids missing…”

The article is a glowing profile of the young president of the Sionis Property Group, the charming, hungry businessman single-handedly revitalizing Gotham’s reputation as a vacation destination with the grand opening of his newest venture. _“We created the Black Mask to be the kind of place you can lose yourself in,”_ reads the pop-out quote, next to a photograph of the subject himself, standing in a white suit in the foyer of a beautiful mansion. _“Our clients are people from all over the world who have come to relax and enjoy themselves, and they’re bringing their business with them. Gotham has always relied on tourism as its main industry, and the casino is going to work wonders for it. It’s my hometown, you know; I’m just grateful that I can be a part of restoring it to its glory days again.”_

“Bruce,” Tim is saying. He sounds unsteady, almost frantic. “You don’t think—I mean, you don’t think—”

“I do.” It’s almost miraculous: Bruce feels better now. He and Dick have not always been the best at communicating with each other, but right now, it is as if Dick is here himself, laying everything out for him. He stares at the face of Roman Sionis, the real estate king of New Jersey, and revels in the hard, cold satisfaction of acquiring a target. “Somehow, Roman Sionis made those kids disappear. Dick was going to expose him. But he was killed before he could.”  

Something inside Bruce is waking up, something as undeniable as the turn of the earth. It is dark, and it is steadfast, and it wants only one thing, always just one thing. “So we’re going to do it for him,” Bruce says, meeting Tim and Jason’s gazes. “We’re going to prove Sionis killed Dick. We’re going to bring him to justice.” 

**Author's Note:**

> ok, i went back and forth on posting this one. i couldn't decide whether i wanted to lean into the small town murder mystery genre and have everyone be suspected at some point, or to be true to the bats' extremely observant natures and have them pick up dick's trail pretty quickly. the rotating cast of townspeople-with-a-secret is a hallmark of this type of story, but in the end i decided to just get on with it because, as i hinted in the summary, this is kind of an au but not really--the base reality is still there, despite Whatever's Going On That's Going On, and bruce has still got the mind, instincts, and training of one of the best detectives in the world, even if he doesn't quite know it. also, i feel like that's not really the point of this fic, and the stuff i want to explore is between bruce and the batkids, not necessarily bruce and everyone else in gotham. also, i'm probably just not good enough of a writer to pull off a whole ass broadchurch style script while staying emotionally resonant, so this'll have to do 
> 
> tell me what _you_ think!! is this anything?? or is it nothing???


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